Friday, April 11, 2008

You Can Pet Dinosaurs

This is the front entrance of the original 1913 building of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Leslie's job is managing one of the world's largest worm libraries in the basement of this building which is now being refurbished to its former glory. This entrance looks out on the rose garden at Exposition Park.

Last Saturday, in the nearly impenetrable bowels of another part of the museum, she gave a public talk on the subject of marine garbage. Knowing attendance might be slim she accepted my offer to attend. Great talk. She's giving another one on April 19th.

Afterwards we were standing in the museum's rotunda - a noisy impressive domed stone-walled space filled with little screaming children and skeletons of the iconic T-Rex/Triceratops prize fight. There's a sculpture of a similar scene outside the museum.

At one point, standing there in the tumult, I turned around to see what appeared to be an actual breathing, moving dinosaur coming straight for me. And then another one. I did the obvious thing - I whipped the point-and-shoot out of my pocket, pointed it and shot some video.

I've cobbled the video bits into this 2 minute, 16 second piece. There's no music, so if you hate my compositions watch without fear.

1 comment:

Dear Docker. Thanks for your interest in the dinosaurs we have just delivered to the L.A. museum. We are an Australian based puppetry and physical theatre company called ERTH. Please visit our website www.erth.com.au if you want to find out more. The videos page will have a few extra movies for you to view of our other creations including the New Zealand dinos you have mentioned earlier. CheersSteve Howarth - Design co-ordinator ERTH.